The popularity of OS X among geeks in recent years has led to a lot more people discovering OpenStep through Cocoa. GNUstep provides a much-needed Free Software alternative, as David Chisnall explains.

Miguel superficially attempted to work on GNUstep before starting GNOME, and tossed that in favor recreating COM with CORBA. No one in KDE or GNOME that I can think of had any real interest in developing in GNUstep, or believed that GNUstep would ever "catch up" to fill in the role. GNUstep had already been in development for a pretty long period of time and had less actual work done and little future development interest due its development language. In fact there was some minor interest in creating some ObjC bindings for Gtk+ (which bitrotted) even with some OpenStep dev tool goals but that went nowhere as well. I pretty vividly remember that period of time, and I cannot think of anyone that actually believed what you're saying to be the case.

I was merely talking about the very beginning, when GNUstep was still supposed to be the GNU desktop. As I said, that quickly wasn't a concern, for the reasons you state (Objective-C vs C, lack of interest in OpenStep). But I do remember some comments along the lines when the projects started; I agree they probably were very short-lived

That beeing said, I still believe it was stupid to not work on GNUstep, but I'm really biased here, so take that with a grain of salt